How many chords must someone know to be considered an actual musician?

'Cuz I said 'musicians', not 'social phobics who have just graduated from XBOX and now need a new excuse for living at home at age 31 and staying in their room masturbating while claiming to be doing something 'creative'', altho those ppl can make good records too'

*sigh*

YES, BUT THE DRUMMERS, DAVE! WHAT ABOUT DRUMMERS? and other percussionists?

or are you going to say something dumbass, luddite, and completely ill-informed about them too? Like, 'they just hit things with sticks, don't they?'

But being able to operate an irony-recognition pedal will help in these music-related chat boards.

Even if we're talking about instruments where you can play western chords (so not drums, monophonic instruments, sitars etc) like guitar and piano then the way you've said it means the person would have to not just 'know' chords but also know what they're called. That doesn't matter, it just matters what they sound like and what they sound like in relation to other chords.

For 90% of music you can probably just get away with knowing major and minor, for punk or heavy metal just power chords would do.

Loads of guitarists probably just think "if i put my fingers like this, i get a sound like that"

The way the question is phrased makes it seem like you aspire to (or think it's good to aspire to) some formal knowledge. That can make it a lot easier, but it's not needed. Sometimes you need to know the rules so you can break them. I know everyone says that but it's true.

Ah...*those* drummers. They're a bit like those guitarists to whom it would be nice to say : "change to 7/8 after the second verse" and they say "But I only know how to strum in 4/4 and besides I am the guitarist and therefore Way More Important". And so on.

btw I don't play drums. I just have utmost respect for good drummers, most of whom 'know' when a chord changes even if they can't name it in 3 seconds.

(But if you're asking how many guitar chords I know... erm... about 48 or so real ones, plus a few I made up. But then again, *I* was in Guitar Magazine, so there!)

But really, it's nice to know how to name the chords you're playing, esp. if you have to work with other musicians. Exception: Jad Fair.

No it isn't.

Q: How many lead singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Just one - but all he has to do is stand still and the world revolves around him.

OK back to it: I believe Dan Perry was schooling y'all -

What do you mean no it isn't? OF COURSE it is.

Unless you have perfect pitch. I don't, do you?

the fact is that it can depend on the music no? if you choose to make music with an instrument you need to know a few chords but if you're putting recorded sound from different locations together then you prob would need diff types of skills.

would you consider the resulting piece to be music? are the ppl that make it musicians? I'd prob say yes.

However, the same analytical process is used to identify a chord, regardless of whether you're listening to it or you're looking at it.

A: Three. One to hold the lightbulb and two to drink until the WORLD spins...

I suspect that puts you in an elite category round these parts. I guess it's pretty easy to say that a certain chord sounds minor or major, but beyond that my guess is that most of us can't even tell an e chord from an f just by hearing it, let alone a g sharp from an h flat.

And anyway, Di is absolutely OTM.

You CAN learn it, though, contrary to popular belief. It just takes a while. Whether or not its necessary or not, that's been a long-standing debate. Probably not in rock, although it would be much easier for you. As for classical, there are some snobs who think that you can't be great w/o it (though I disagree).

Well I never claimed to be consistent!

I was a bit confusing though, basically I think:

You don't need to know theory

sometimes knowing it is good

sometimes knowing it is bad

It's more important how things sound than what they're called.

"dude, hold on...what you just played, that was cool. What *was* that?"

"uh...I dunno. Let me try and do it again." (Takes another sip of beer and squints at neck of guitar.)

What Dan is talking about is known is "relative pitch", and in my experience is a lot more useful than perfect pitch -- difference being that even if three of us are playing tune with each other, making wonderfully sonorous music, the guy with perfect pitch will be shifting in his seat because he can't hear the perfect root. Which, in practical terms, doesn't matter in the slightest.

Well this cleared things up a bit; I was thinking perfect pitch. Of course, I'd have to do some tinkering around on the piano before getting relative pitch absolutely right.

Honestly, I can't think of a single reason why knowing music theory would be bad. It makes performing/writing music easier, plus in Paula's example it allows you to communicate what you're doing to other musicians in a fairly efficient manner.

I feel like the old people with computers, it just makes my dizzy.

(The most obvious scale for an improviser to use on a Dmaj7 chord is the D major scale but the 4th/11th interval (G) tends not to sound good so most modern jazzers would raise it to a G#. Giving you, surprise surprise, a maj7#11 harmony. Pretty much the standard approach to a major chord if it's functioning as the tonic.

BUT if I saw that chord on a chart I'd assume in most cases that a Dmaj7 was called for but that there was a G# in the melody of the tune. It would depend on the context but it seems likely you could ignore the G# if you were playing a comping instrument, unless you particularly wanted that harmony in, which would be a personal decision made by your ear, not theory).

But as others point out, it's not a question of learning a list of chords. It's a case of getting your EAR good enough to HEAR these harmonies, which usually means a working knowledge of functional harmony and a lot of work unless you are very fortunately blessed with superhuman ears; and being technically proficient enough on your instrument to play what you hear. In the long run theory is just a way of training your ears.

In other words, in a jazz rhythm section, a piano or guitar player who sees "Dmaj7#11" doesn't necessarily have to play the G#. (S)he doesn't even have to play the D, for that matter -- since there's a bass player, a lot of the time, the chordal instrument will omit the tonic, playing voicings like (in this case) F#-A-C#-E or F#-B-E-G#. That approach changes, however, when playing solo or when accompanying a vocalist -- not to mention when improvising or accompanying in other idioms.

"It is important not to mistake formalism for an argument that the creative act can be boiled down to a set of mechanical rules. Like all of the arts, visual design is a discipline comprised of a balance struck between intuition and formalism. I submit simply that work produced in complete ignorance of these formal principles is accidentally ill-formed far more often than it is accidentally well-formed."

An open chord is one that can be played with at least some open strings, i.e. without a barre. In standard tuning, A, C, D, E and G (among others) are open chords; B and F are not. Make sense?

(Well, I bet he said it at some point or another...)

"How to play Guitar
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

Right.

Also, I'm not entirely convinced that piece isn't satiric.

"Who needs to learn letters to write? Just scratch down anything you want! It's easy, you can master writing novels in a day!"

Ever heard of cut-up? Ever read Hopscotch? Finnegan's Wake?

The point is both methods are valid, it depends more on the disposition and personality of the performer than anything else. Seems to me your strongest argument is that theory is most useful when you need to communicate ideas to other musicians. But if Fair's playing by himself, what does he need to worry about communication for? Theory, by extension, wouldn't be of much use...

Try actually reading what he is trying to say instead of immediately trying to cram it into your preconceptions. Yes, Mr. Fair is being humorous, but he is also being serious getting a point across. There's no need to feel threatened by it.

2. "Creativity is stifled by convention" is a cop-out line used by lazy people to explain why they're too good to study or learn.

Could you make a bigger generalization completely unbased in reality? Sure, there are people who might use it as an excuse, but it's also true that there are just as many you use musical theory as a crutch, lazily going where convention pulls their nose. Both are valid approaches and simply processes to make music -- what's really important is who is using the process and what they create -- a band like Hair Police is just as terrible as Yes.

I've heard of cut-up and thought it was a really neat idea when I was 16. I've never read _Hopscotch_ or _Finnegan's Wake_ and I probably never will.

The point is both methods are valid, it depends more on the disposition and personality of the performer than anything else. Seems to me your strongest argument is that theory is most useful when you need to communicate ideas to other musicians. But if Fair's playing by himself, what does he need to worry about communication for? Theory, by extension, wouldn't be of much use...

How does he recreate the tunings for songs he's written if he doesn't know what notes he's tuned his guitar strings to, or even which strings he used to develop the tuning? How does he keep track of that? How does he keep track of the rhythmic pulse of the songs? How does he remember how fast or how slow he wanted a particular song to be? If there's a melody that goes with the song, how does he remember how it went? If he writes anything down to help keep all of that stuff straight, he's recreating basic music theory that anyone could pick up in a week. If not, then he's wasting time playing back recorded stuff and trying to remember which strings he hit, how a particular line went, how fast it was, and the rhythms that went into it when (and this is the important part) THERE ISN'T A SINGLE THING HE'S CREATED WHICH COULDN'T BE REPRESENTED IN THE EXISTING MUSIC THEORY FRAMEWORK. I was half-kidding with the Sonic Youth comment, but the point is there; the concept of "detuning" and swapping strings around doesn't invalidate the concept of learning the names of notes, learning about accidentals, learning about time signatures and tempos, and learning about chord progressions and voice-leading, and furthermore learning about those things "stifles creativity" about as much as learning to spell and capitalize stifled ee cummings.

Also Dave, you're wrong. Dizzy Gillespie didn't have any formal trumpet instruction at first, but he had at least a year of piano lessons from friends and school before teaching himself the trumpet, then went on to learn some stuff from Charlie Shavers and Carl "Bama" Warwick, as well as studying technique based on Louis Arrmstrong recordings. Source.

Sure, there are people who might use it as an excuse, but it's also true that there are just as many you use musical theory as a crutch, lazily going where convention pulls their nose.

Yes, there are. These people suck just as much.

Diz may have been a bad musician to cite, then .. but there are plenty of others ... Although I agre with you to some extent - because even if people are self-taught, they are still imitating what they've heard other people do..

I think the important thing about the Dizzy Gillespie example is that while he did teach himself to play the trumpet and basically picked up what he knew about that instrument on the fly, he would have learned about notes, intervals, basic chords, key signatures, time signatures, and tempo markings from a year of piano lessons, and that's really the only parts of theory you need to know.

Huh. Well, I'm kind of baffled that you dismiss this so easily. Seems rather self-evident to me that this technique (and by extension sampling, collage, hypertext, etc.) is the most revolutionary creative step of the 20th century.

As for the "Fair's tricks fit w/theory" argument - of course what he's playing can be DESCRIBED by theory, but so what? He has no use for the description. If he isn't playing with other musicians, he has little need to communicate what he's doing. And if he's improvising, why should he worry about repeating anything? You see, you're imposing limits on Fair based on *what you think he wants to do with his music* - when he's clearly stated that he accepts no limits. You assume he would need to remember something (why?), you assume he would need to write something down (what for?)... why not just write a bunch of stuff with one tuning, then throw that away when he gets tired of it and do something else? Sure he could spend time learning how to use theory to describe/track what he's doing, but maybe he's not interested in that. Maybe going down that path would distract him from writing more songs, trying other tunings, etc. You're assuming you know what the musicians ends are (and that theory is the best path to those ends) as opposed to accepting that everyone's gonna have different goals/approaches.

Don't get me wrong, I find some theory stuff useful myself, but I can only deal with it in limited amounts before it starts to suck out my enthusiasm for writing music...

Is the suggestion here that self-taught players don't know theory? (ie you can't teach yourself theory?)

"Unlike Bird, Dizzy was an enthusiastic teacher who wrote down his musical innovations and was eager to explain them to the next generation, thereby insuring that bebop would eventually become the foundation of jazz." (AMG)

How did he do, that, do you think, with no knowledge of theory?

Pop fans can use the same argument for the Beach Boys and Beatles. We aren't living in a world where musicians are forced to study hundreds of years of music theory anymore -- but in no way does this mean it isn't "studied" on a daily basis by musicians, who otherwise have no formal training. Even I, as an ignorant teenager, listened to "Heroes and Villains" and tried to get down all those harmonies -- years later, that stuff is just as important to me as what I learned in college.

I really, really really hope everything he comes up with is brilliant, otherwise at some point he's going to get laughed off stage.

For most of their career, they've had some trained musicians in the band, as well as a couple of people who play by the David Fair Technique. The combination sounds great, actually.

The other essential document to understand the meaning in practice of David's ideas is Jad's solo EP _The Zombies of Mora-Tau_. It would be nearly impossible to notate most of the music conventionally (although a few songs do have repetitive patterns), but the songs' words and _approximate_ rhythms/timbres/pitches make them possible to replicate as "compositions"--actually, Jad has played "Frankenstein Must Die" from that record at every solo show I've ever seen him do.

I'm being a jackass about this because if they're presenting something to the public where they are trying to recreate if not the letter then the spirit of something they've recorded, then they DO need some way of remembering how they created the detunings and rhythmic patterns that they've come up with, despite what Shakey, Jack and David himself are saying about "freeing yourself from limitations".

It would be nearly impossible to notate most of the music conventionally

Have you ever looked at the score for a piece of modern music?

Gettign back to my cut-up method example: I'd be curious to see a score for a piece composed entirely of samples (like, say, De La Soul's "Change in Speak"). Just accept it, theory is useless in certain contexts....

!sknaht ,ylsuoireS )-:!sdrawkcab pu dnuow I ,derettalf os m'I

Notorious disadvantages of perfect pitch are mostly mythic.

Agreed, though Dan's transposition point is quite right in my case -- if you hand me a chart in A, and tell me to sing or play it in Eb, I'm in trouble. (Also problematic are the transposition buttons on keyboards.) I can accommodate about a half-step either way, and since I grew up playing the trumpet and other transposing instruments, I can sometimes sight-transpose at a major second by pretending it's written for trumpet. But for the most part, it feels like being asked to call everything red "yellow", everything yellow "blue", etc. (On the other hand, out-of-tune music doesn't bother me at all, unless it's a tape or record that's being played at the wrong speed.)

Half Jap has made some grate songs, but what's interesting is how many conventions they really do fall back on--the use of I, IV, and V chords esp.

Bingo: I love outsider/unschooled/wild-talent music as much as anyone, but anyone with an ear can tell you that 95% of the time, what's going on is a slightly distorted reprise of extremely well-known, thoroughly codified themes.

Ever read Hopscotch? Finnegan's Wake?

Last time I checked, James Joyce was acquainted with grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. Whether or not he needed to deploy them in a particular work, (a) they informed his work as a whole, (b) gave him access to a rich heritage of literature that in turn enriched his work, and (c) provided an opportunity for him to engage in that courageous act known as "learning", a process through which one's mettle as an artist is built.

And that's really my whole problem with all this. All these arguments about how it's great not to know anything, blah, blah, blah -- all it comes down to is a massive excusing-away of anxiety. Confronting your own ignorance is potentially quite scary, but growth -- as a musician and as a human being -- depends on it, and when people talk about how they don't need to engage the past, don't need to learn anything and just need to focus on their creative selves, all I hear is, "Hello, I'm too chickenshit to face the fact that I don't know what I ought to, so instead of confronting my anxiety, I'll just engage in narcissistic obfuscatory bullshit to hide my feelings of inadequacy." And believe you me, I have plenty of hands-on musical experience with people of this stripe. It's the most toxic aspect of the Romantic creator-myth, and it leads to boring, dishonest music, one-trick ponies, and neurosis.

No, I'm not talking about people like Wesley Willis, or the Shaggs: working with unschooled musicians can be wonderful and joyful, and can lead to some marvelous and unexpected things at times. (I'm a Jandek fan, after all!) But I have very little patience for those who are actually proud of their ignorance, and to be honest, I see all anti-theory apologias as being born of either cowardice and insecurity, or out of noble savage-style fetishizing. Talking about whether David Fair's theory is "valid" is meaningless -- art is a communicative, creative act, and people who actually have something to say with their music seldom need to hide behind a layer of mystification.

Learning theory can be scary, depressing, draining. So can learning kung fu. The question is, do you want to be the guy who air-punches in his bedroom all day -- no doubt a very valid way to spend one's time -- or do you want to actually have power and control of your own body? None of us are going to live forever, and we have to decide for ourselves how much time we want to spend in fantasy before we're willing to relinquish the "anything-is-possible" feeling that comes with ignorance, and an unwillingness to commit wholeheartedly to anything, in favor of engagement with the real world and acknowledgement of our own mortality and fallibility -- and potential for strength and brilliance.

Sorry if this seems growly, but it's a pet peeve.

Bullshit. Whether or not classical theory has the vocabulary to describe it just yet, there is every reason to believe that De La Soul can be talked about in an articulate and technical manner that illuminates the piece and permits one to understand better how it works and what's effective about it. THAT is what theory is, not "Dmaj7#11" and whatnot.

Don't fear analysis. The part of music that's evanescent, emotive, and intuitive will never be crushed by it.

I find it ironic that I'm arguing with people who believe "theory stifles creativity" where the cornerstone of their belief comes from a lack of imagination in how theory can be used.

Phil, you have gone from being my hero to being my GOD.

Repetition is rock n roll, you know, (so says arch music-theorist Mark E. Smith, anyway).

You could also spend more time tweaking, filtering, and messing around with a sample than you it would take to write on a percussion staff a whole note that represented the sample for three bars, a half-rest and a half note located elsewhere on the percussion staff indicating a different sample coming in on beat three of the fourth bar, than putting in repeat marks for the next twenty-eight measures.

I freely admit that this isn't a widely-accepted way to represent music built off of samples, but it certainly could be. DJ Radar has already created scratch notation, and notating sample-based music would be much less complicated than that, since more time generally goes into picking the samples and chopping them up and tweaking them into the form you want than actually sequencing them.

That's the big fight here: there seems to be a desire to find some kind of music that can't be talked about, that'll remain mysterious and opaque in the face of analysis. But I think the fertility of human insight is a bit greater than you're imagining.

Anything can be talked about, dissected, discussed, decontructed, etc. I have NO PROBLEM with this. My argument is just that it isn't always useful or necessary. There are circumstances when it serves no discernible purpose. This has been my point from the beginning.

I do not, however, agree that it's impossible to develop a vocabulary that would address those things as systematically as conventional notation addresses pitch, rhythm, phrasing, and so on. That knowledge is already present in the minds of successful creators, in intuitive and un-articulated form; the job of the theoretician is to articulate and codify it.

The alternative, you see, is: "If you have to ask, lady..."

OK, but I have to admit to being entirely unclear as to where you think it's useless/unnecessary...?

Cut-up techniques, sampling, David Fair's "beginner" approach, improvisation, etc. Theory may explain the results - either in part or in full - but it just isn't necessary on the creative end.

You can have crescendo/descrescendo-style markings that show when certain filters are turned up and when they're turned down. You can squiggle the staff to indicate increased distortion. Effects can be represented with accent markings.

Seriously, have you ever looked at a percussion score or an avant-garde score? People are notating everything you can imagine already; why is it such a stretch to imagine people notating samples?

(And the "you" wasn't directed at Curtis.)

And how would knowing these things improve/facilitate the creation of the music?

Oh come on, what would be the point of "performing" "Change in Speak"? Why do other people need to know how to perform your music? How does knowing how to tell people to do what you do improve the actual music? Seems to me enabling other people to play what you've created is completely secondary/incidental to the actual playing/creating...

Heh, I can imagine you in 3300 B.C.:

Zig-Shub-Kephar: "I've invented this way of writing down our language!"
Mo-Kal-Yar: "What use would that be? How will that help me give better speeches, or talk more tenderly to my concubine? And it can't capture all the subtleties of tone, timing, pronunciation..."

"Because it lets you articulate to yourself exactly what you're doing. It lets you refine your creations, rather than having to start from scratch every time or rely entirely on memory. It lets someone else see exactly what you're doing, and provides them with a way to articulately suggest alternatives, or to react to your creations in an interesting way. It helps you to understand the connections between your work and that of someone else who's also using the system, and helps you to identify some of the things they're doing that you can't figure out aurally, but would like to explore."

And yet, the art of sampled music developed, went through a "golden age", splintered, etc. all WITHOUT this framework of notation at all. Artists accomplished all the interactions you discuss without any reliance on conventional theory (again, the best example here is hip-hop DJs). The overall lesson being that the knowledge of theory was completely unnecessary in the making of great (even groundbreaking) music.

As for my musical training - I was in a concert band as a child (clarinet - ugh) for four years, then picked up and taught myself guitar late in my teens. I have a smattering of conventional musical knowledge, I can name certain notes, chords, can read a chord chart, etc. I *do* think that learning these things has been fantastically useful in certain respects (writing a pop song, for example).

Is creating a meta-language to describe all types of music necessary? No. Is creating a meta-language to describe all types of music stifling to creativity? No. Yet you seem convinced that not only is it not possible, but it's detrimental.

And anyway, hip-hop is just about as codified, and as potentially susceptible to notation, as any art form that's ever been.

On the other hand, I would bet that even the hundreds of times Jad has played "Frankenstein Must Die" solo, he's never played it with the same chords or in the same tuning twice, because he doesn't tune his guitar, except in the sense that sometimes twisting the pegs makes a sound he likes, and he tries to keep the strings from either snapping or falling off. (He probably plays that song with a moderately similar pace and high-part-of-neck/low-part-of-neck set of hand positions every time, though.)

Dan and Phil are roughly OTM, and it comes down to this: you can ignore what theory you've learned, but you can't ignore not-knowing what you haven't learned. All of this "theory is limiting" talk is a cop-out on any level, because -- well, because its adherents are claiming:

(a) that they're such weak-willed sheep that they can't absorb the information without being forever confined by it;

(b) that they subscribe to this kids-movie vision of the world in which the good-hearted 10-year-old would actually make a better president than the grown educated man; and in sum

(c) "the more you know, the less you know?"

Consciously avoiding learning about the thing you're doing -- learning anything about it, whether it's proper theory or just random examples of things people have done and how -- is a fool's game. Sure, maybe you can do it just fine with what you already know: good on you. But people need to quit pretending it's some bold courageous act to keep up their ignorance of their technical options.

1) No, but if your work has any explicit or semi-explicit connection to previous work, you're far more likely not to reinvent the proverbial wheel if you either know your theory, or can intuit it through study of other works. Early jazz musicians often didn't know how to read music, or the names of notes. But jazz became a lot more sophisticated, rich, and multi-faceted once the proportion of literate musicians went up.

2) I'll post it again:

"It is important not to mistake formalism for an argument that the creative act can be boiled down to a set of mechanical rules. Like all of the arts, visual design is a discipline comprised of a balance struck between intuition and formalism. I submit simply that work produced in complete ignorance of these formal principles is accidentally ill-formed far more often than it is accidentally well-formed."

And yes, I'm damned proud of the fact that I worked hard to learn more about music and to become a more educated person. Why wouldn't I be? It's made me a better musician, a better teacher, and helped me to enjoy music more deeply and broadly than I ever would've otherwise. There was no shame in being ignorant when I started out, but once I made the decision to have music be a big part of my life, I knew that I could either spend the rest of my life hiding my inadequacies, or confronting them and mastering them. It's still an ongoing, lifelong project, but I'm proud of the fact that I didn't take the chickenshit approach and pretend that I was a perfectly formed genius who didn't need to hear what anyone else had to say.

But what you're really arguing about is whether people should be encouraged to just have randomly at instruments in a great celebration of the possibility that a very small number of them will figure out something interesting to do with them -- or whether we should set our ears to "critical" and rhetorically encourage everyone who wants to make music to, if at all possible, get a basic lay of the conventions of the art before they make likely-unsuccessful bids at actually performing.

Those two propositions aren't so much mutually exclusive as dependent on one another: the former only has any currency because most people opt for the latter. (Another way of putting this is that in a worldful of Jad Fairs Jad Fair would suck ass.)

Also Mo: I for one have not claimed to be anything more than ignorant about music theory. I've only said that that's not something I feel much of a need to celebrate -- and so long as I'm going around making music, I'll certainly be trying to learn as much as I reasonably can about things that might help me do so.

(Seriously: very good thread. I've been more convinced by the pro-theory people than I ever have before, certainly. I think where some people get their suspicions of 'theory' from - me included - is the sense that the theoreticians will then go on to apply theory to assess music qualitatively as well as quantitatively - that it becomes a back-door to our old pal 'objectivity'. The more analytical tools for understanding something we have the better, though.)

Dan, surely this is somewhat of a lazy reading of that quote.

I can't front; I had seven years of musical training as a tuba player, and I taught myself a lot about scales and intervals and such when I taught myself to play guitar. I feel that it's only helped me, really. A lot of the things I "know" I know intuitively; I might not be able to articulate exactly what goes on, but I know where my fingers should go, or I know how this rhythmic pattern should work out, or whatever.

Knowing music theory (in the broader sense of incorporating it skillfully into your own playing or using it to critique others' playing) certainly doesn't mean being able to articulate everything that goes on in a piece. It's in the showing rather than the telling, if you will, that a working understanding -- or, perhaps better, internalization -- of music theory is really valuable.

They also seem to be saying that everything fits into "theory" .. no matter what you create, if you can diagram it, YES! that's music theory! So if you play something and want to play it again, just remembering how you did it means you're using music theory.?

"First you hit the 5-gallon pail 3 times with your left hand, then you hit the mailbox twice with a stick. The other guy shuffles his feet and repeatedly claps his hands. Do it at the speed of that chirping the air conditioner makes on that one bulding on 57th. And you over there, rant about all the rats you have to sleep with."

..They don't know it, but they're using ... ahem ... MUSIC THEORY!!!! woohoo!

And speaking of formal systems, you don't need the standard mathematical toolkit of symbols to do maths, you can invent your own if you want. But you'd be a fool not to make use of humanity's standard system, where possible.

So you just negated your entire argument. None of us ever said it wasn't useful - all we said was that it wasn't necessary. .. and sometimes it's preferable.

Dan hasn't negated his argument at all. Which is better, "put that finger there, then there, then there, and play a sort of dumdumda da thing", or "play a rocky thing in D".

It's not a question of which is better - the argument is that music can be made without theory.

...except for the part where you equated music theory with convention and said it stifled creativity. That's what touched off the entire discussion more than anything else.

So someone could have recorded it and transcribed it so it could be played again. So NOW it's music?

So, I guess this whole thing is my fault!

Sorry!

It's not my intention to have anyone ever repeat what I played, because it was a moment or inspiration & repeating it would ruin the memory...

So someone could have recorded it and transcribed it so it could be played again. So NOW it's music?

It was music the first time you played it, but why on Earth would you not want to play it again if it affected you so much? What's the point of creating a wonderful piece of music that you love if you're going to throw it away and never play it again? I don't understand.

The Muslimgauze/Merzbow theory of music? (This presumes that everything they ever do/did is wonderful, admittedly.)

Mr Perry: I admire your musicology. I wish I shared it. Don't imagine I think my own ignorance is a virtue. It's a curse. My question was a real one, though. One sign that I'm probably not a Musician is that I don't know the names of those chords.

Mind you & come to think of it: if I wanted to teach these chords to someone else, and they knew as little as I do now, then it wouldn't really matter if I had cured my own oblivion.

My answer is still that you are a musician, but I would strongly encourage you to learn how to name chords because I think it will make your life a lot easier in the long run.

Because the other circumstances around it have changed... The quality of the sunlight, the mood I was in, etc .. hearing it again would be a letdown - it's more valuable just as a thought.

Tracer, I don't totally disagree.. because I don't advocate ignoring prior wisdom altogether... I just think that you have to approach things (especially artistic things) from a new perspective in order to expand on it. .. uh .. not "in order to", but "as a way to" ...

That's why we have new words & new languages. That's why we have different scales in music for that matter.. Someone did it differently, sometimes on purpose & sometimes by accident/ignorance. And yes, if it's truly great, you can make it into a rule, if you're stuck in that mindset.

Ignoring thousands of years of accumulated human wisdom and discovery of music just seems awfully arrogant
..One could also say, "Following thousands of years of accumulated human wisdom and discovery of music is closed-minded."

..I happen to think it's somewhere in the middle (but, admittedly, closer to the first statement.)

I would not call someone who did this a musician.

And yes, if it's truly great, you can make it into a rule, if you're stuck in that mindset.

Music theory in the sense it's being advocated here does not include "rules" -- it's purely descriptive, particularly in Dan's scheme. Even in the sense that music theory has traditionally contained let's say suggestions -- such as the idea that a maj7 chord was not a natural chord -- those suggestions have done nothing to diminish the effect of using that maj7 chord: if anything they enhance it, and traditionally it's been precisely the naming of what has been done that's given people the best roadmaps to start inquiring what's beyond those outlines.

Basically I'd rather not sort through the peckings of those infinite monkeys at typewriters; I'm pro-theory insofar as I think things would work better if the monkeys all got a dictionary and a copy of Macbeth to start from.

Wait, I'm not sure it's this either. Wouldn't it be something closer to "Say you're a storyteller. It would be nice to know how stories are told." I mean, storyteller theory would include things like "There are things things called characters, and this thing called a narrative arc".

A matter of taste & willingness to be adventurous...

I think we're vehemently agreeing, but you guys aren't willing to admit it.. Theory IS USEFUL. Divergence from/absence of theory CAN still work.

Any other interpretation is nitpicking.

Many people spend a lot of time mistakenly thinking they are "breaking the mold" when they are in fact reinventing the wheel.

A lot of intro theory is spent learning the "building blocks" (rhythm, tempo, note values, intervals, chords, chord progressions, key signatures, minor, major, modality) before segueing into harmonization "rules". Moving into post-tonal theory throws most of the original voice-leading rules out the window in favor of a scheme where you devise the tonal qualities you want for a particular piece and then build your own harmonization rules based off of that. Potentially, the rules change every time you write a piece and the melodies and counter-melodies spin out of the baseline tonal colors you set for yourself before you started writing the piece. (Not that this is the only way to write post-tonal music; it's just an example.)

I'm not trying to say "you have to follow the rules" as much as I'm trying to say "you should learn enough about music to make up your own rules". "There are no rules" is still a rule. David Fair has, in the course of tooling around with his guitar, come up with ideas that mirror a very small subset of things that John Zorn does (I'd love to do Zorn's game theory piece someday).

But yeah, I'm shutting up because as I said before, we're arguing the same point filtered through falsely-opposed filters.

This just isn't true, period. Theory is a tool that empowers our creative intuition: do you really think that the art of storytelling, for instance, hasn't been empowered by the evolution of written language? Yet written language represents a kind of abstraction, for spoken language, that's similar to the abstraction that takes place in music notation and analysis.

And that's just one side of theory. If you're going to claim that learning about chords, harmonic relationships, complex rhythms and so on hasn't informed my creative process, then you're speaking nonsense. Nobody is ahistorical: a musician picking up his/her instrument is a lens through which a lifetime of musical experiences can pass -- and if theory is anything, it's a structured way of talking about and thinking about those experiences, and using them to create new ones, whether in a solitary or shared environment.

And not directed at Dan in particular (and I totally respect Dan about this whole subject) ...
"This has no value." <> "I can't see the value in this."

..and Phil .. you're just not gettin' all the key points...
. Theory is a tool that empowers our creative intuition: do you really think that the art of storytelling, for instance, hasn't been empowered by the evolution of written language? .. If you're going to claim that learning about chords, harmonic relationships, complex rhythms and so on hasn't informed my creative process, then you're speaking nonsense.
I am certainly not saying that. Read it all again.

Well no, because the only absolute in life is that there are no absolutes. :-)

Obviously you can do that without a working knowledge of theory/musical terms/what have you, but you can't deny that it makes it easier

"So you just negated your entire argument. None of us ever said it wasn't useful - all we said was that it wasn't necessary. .. and sometimes it's preferable."

Personally, I think it's never preferable. That's what it comes down to, for me. I think ignorance can never, ever be preferable to knowledge, and my experiences with those who argue otherwise have, over and over again, led me to have very grave reservations about their motivations.

but the counter to this danger is more deeper theory, or else smarter more flexible meta-theory, not dropping theory altogether

(i've tangled before with phil on the problems i think stave-notation has historically has in analysing rhythm, and in fact in downgrading complex rhythm as an expressive element in western composed music: but it's not as if i think this is an insoluble problem for all time, so much as a specific phenomenon during a particular historical era => as soon as you're aware of it, and take it into consideration, it begins to dissolve)

>>> Sure it would, P, because you could teach the person how to identify chords, then show him the cool chords you're using (which would now have names understood not only by the two of you, but also any other musician who knows how to identify chords). [...] I would strongly encourage you to learn how to name chords because I think it will make your life a lot easier in the long run.

-- To adopt a favoured Sinker meme: the words 'teach' and 'learn' are doing a lot of work in those sentences. (I don't think it's work I'm up to; or to which I'm up. One of them is hard enough; both?)

but once i've seen it and started writing the review i'm quite happy to read all kinds of stuff

there's a story in john litweiler's book on ornette, about ornette reading up on some aspect of music theory which he'd (says litweiler) never understood properly, and based his entire harmolodic theory on: anyway when he read what he read, he was so upset that he THREW UP!! Bcz he thought it totally invalidated his entire life's work

but of course it didn't: all it meant was that his way of explaining what he was doing to other musicians was very confusing to them (which actually he already knew, cz they always said so)

Am I the only one who would take issue with this statement (insofar as a musician's "knowing theory" and his/her music's "fitting the mold" don't have anything to do with one another)?

I mean, it's a perfectly valid statement but unless you're claiming that "knowing about musical conventions and traditional theory" necessarily links to "fitting the mold" then it has nothing at all to do with this thread. And I think that's (half of) why this thread has been contentious: I get the sense from the anti-theory camp that they think supporting the learning of theory necessarily means supporting the by-numbers application of it.

(But we've been around that upthread.)

Maybe I missed the Zorn bit! One second.

Personally, I'd prefer to be the guy sitting in the corner pondering. Which is me and music, really -- I interact but I don't create. In that respect I've been like Tom in this discussion, both very well-inclined to the pro-theory camp (if we can call it that) but wary of presumptions of objectivity...but Phil and I have been over that before. ;-) And it hasn't come up anyway, so yay.

FWIW, any analogy to writing as a creative act intrigues me given that's where whatever creative gift I have seems to lie, however poorly done. I will say that generally speaking I haven't done anything formal in terms of writing training, both journalistically and creatively. Doubtless for many it can and does show (it would especially show in terms of formal poetry, but I eschew it in large part for that very reason -- I'm not proud of that, merely aware of it). But on the flip side, I don't feel compromised by this lack, partially because I've found a way to express myself I'm perfectly comfortable with, partially because I've gotten good responses to those expressions, they connect on some level. And yet at the same time -- noting Chris Piuma's point above -- I've certainly had plenty of experience and training as a reader, and while I haven't had specific writing training as such, the act of expression in a larger educational framework -- essays, brainstorming, whatever -- provokes you to get something out onto the page.

It makes me wonder -- what if music was considered as a second language you learned while growing up? Or a third language, if you considered the world of sight and signs to be its own code to learn/be infected by (if language is indeed a virus)? Quite possibly this argument wouldn't exist, since we'd all know how to 'talk' in that style and sense, or to interpret it at the very least. This stretches the analogy, perhaps, but consider the difference between responding to the sound of a voice speaking a language not your own and knowing what that voice is 'actually' saying -- a perhaps loaded construct to apply to musical notes, and yet. At least, that is how I am understanding the pro-theory argument here (and perhaps it's already been advanced that way on this thread in so many words, so I apologize for any repetition).

1. Phrases like "Personally, I think..." "I would rather ..."
--- That's fine if that's what you prefer. That doesn't make not sticking to theory wrong.

2. Equating the transcription of music after it's been created to "knowing theory"
--- If someone else does the transcription, then the person who created the music has not necessarily used theory. Everything can be quantified. So if the ability to write it down after it's created is music theory, it's also math theory.

3. The repeated argument that creativity is easier when you have a working knowledge of music theory.
--- It's easier to create things that sound like things you've heard before, yes. It's easier to improve on an invention than it is to come up with an invention all your own.

"To create is divine. To repeat is human." -Man Ray

I think you are overemphasising the distinction between reading and writing. As far as language is concerned you were born surrounded by highly sophisticated users, and some of them no doubt made it their business to teach you how to speak, read etc. Everyone had that hot-house training, although there would obviously be some variation depending on what school you went to, how articulate/interested in language your parents were/what books were around etc. But the basic point is that you were trained in language: now your natural aptitude for it now allows you to use it as a means of expression at a sophisticated level.

(To look at it another way, imagine you had been washed ashore on a desert island aged one week and been brought up by it's only inhabitant, a deaf mute. A radio is salvaged from the wreckage and you regularly listen to it broadcasting in French throughout your childhood. You are rescued aged 16. How good would your French speaking skills have been? I'd guess that merely being exposed the language without some guidance or explanation or practice would not have taken you very far.)

There is also the difference that language is more crucial than music to human survival and we are almost certainly hard-wired to learn it more easily. Think of the phrase "how are you doing" (4 words): how often would most people need to hear that phrase before they could invariably identify it as the same phrase when they heard it in future? Now think of a min/maj 7 chord (4 notes, 3 intervals): how many times would most people need to hear it before they could invariably identify a chord as a min/maj7 whenever they heard it? Apart from a minority of talented individuals, the answer is quite often. Our musical memories seem to be much less efficient than our verbal memories, which has implications for the need for music to be more consciously learned. (Even people who pick up a guitar and learn the basics from copying records are, it seems to me, learning music in a much more deliberate way than people typically learn language).

One of the dimensions along which this discussion is splitting is the dual function of any kind of language as a means of notating ideas & as a framework you use for having ideas – the ‘anti-theory’ idea embodies a suspicion that language doesn’t just express thought, it *guides* it – I don’t think this is an unreasonable suspicion, given our conscious experience (well, mine anyway) that we don’t just choose *what* to think, then search through a database of words to try to grid/map our thoughts/feelings onto our available word-notation – the process is so automatic/parallel that it just feels like thinking in words.
A suspicion of music theory can arise from different angles relating to this:
- as an even clumsier manifestation of this process, whereby because the descriptive system is coarser-grained, the results of absorbing it as the framework within which you think your musical thoughts means you only get lumpier/blander music concepts in your head – this suspicion gets ‘confirming’ examples every day when most of what you hear sounds so normal.
- because fence-and-tadpole music notation is a much coarser/sparser system for describing its material than the written word is for describing, er, everything, then it can be seen as a more restrictive descriptive/communicative framework imposed upon a more variable world of possible sound. (I bow to Dan’s superior knowledge at this point, but the impression I have from investigating classical music is that scores have left out so much of what makes it sound a particular way that the vastly different ‘interpretations’ of a particular piece arise from that.
- syntactical ‘rules’ do exist in languages – maybe there is a suspicion that they must do so in music language too: ‘you can’t play that there, it doesn’t make sense’ – ppl *will* say this kind of thing!
- the overlap in practice of music-theorists moving from a descriptive to a prescriptive role: this just does happen – you end up with a form of ROCKISM (yay!). The suspicion is that because this process is about ‘knowledge’ being used as an ego weapon, it just can’t apply to an ‘anything goes’ mentality which is about rejecting that: far from being seen as a glorification of ignorance, this mentality is about cheerful rejection of the snobbery arising from this quantitative => qualitative transformations.
( I don’t think it’s about, as Nabisco put it, ‘the more you know the less you know’ – it’s about ‘the more you know, the less you have your own opinions’ – a notion that is daft but also has something to it, I think, because:
(a) in practice v.few ppl get beyond knowledge as the filling of a bucket and into knowledge as the lighting of a fire
(b) it depends on what it is you ‘know’: sometimes you hear art/architecture/philosophy ppl who seem, for want of a better phrase, to have been educated out of their senses & critical faculties – knowledge acting as compromiser/confuser instead of clarifier (again, this is to do with your personal/social relationship to all these processes and whether you believe in ‘hierarchies’ of knowledge types)

(mark s – wasn’t there some famous self-taught Indian mathematical prodigy, who, it was acknowledged, came up with some bizarre maths ideas/theorems/proofs that he almost certainly would not have created had he received a full maths education first? I know it’s a compromised example because (a) he was a genius and not a thrashing typewriter monkey
(b) the extent to which his ideas were communicable depended on use of/translation into the standard math-notation of the Oxbridge squad in the end anyway
but this kind of thing is maybe part of what the ‘anti-theory’ mentality is imagining....)

And- isn't there also a dimension in here related to the extent of 'abstraction' within the activity/language being discussed, and its *function* within the culture? For communication - either between ppl wanting to exercise the craft of it, or between the makers -> listeners in terms of the establishment of a system of rules-of-thumb for metaphor/representation/description (eg if you want to make ppl feel like this then these keys/chords/whatever will generally get you in that area within our present culture) then theory must be a key to let you into those areas. But not all music-making or listening is about these processes – some of it seems more like abstract painting or maths or a kind of ‘sublimation’, with a function which isn’t that literal or prosaic or social ?

Me – I wish I had had Dan & Phil as music teachers! Maybe then I wouldn’t have found ‘music classes’ at school to be as arid and as boring, and as irrelevant as they seemed to be to anything about sound/music that I was actually interested in and affected by.....

but w/o his oxbridge sponsor (whose name i've entirely forgotten), it would all have been totally lost: you totally need both sides, overall, but no one person needs to be front-rank at both sides at the the same time (music's a social and collective activity anyway, and i don't just mean bands, so you can always divide up the labour...)

The name 'G.E Moore' keeps popping up in my mind....?

The portions of music theory that I see as hard and fast "rules" have to do with stricly quantifiable things; naming chords and describing rhythms, tempos and general dynamics. All of the voice-leading and harmonization "rules" are really suggestions or guidelines and are very dependent upon what you want the end result to sound like. If you don't know what you want the end result to sound like, by all means experiment and play around until you like what you hear. When you come up with something you like, though, I stand by my original claim that even a rudimentary grounding in theory can help you capture it so that you can do it again. That's the core of my argument, which I think has been distracted by me going after phantom "I hate learning" red flags.

So back to the original question, paraphrased:
How much music theory do you need to know to be considered a musician? .. assuming someone ELSE can describe it for you.

ie microtonalism is prescribed against by being hard to notate (next to impossible on standard staves, and w/o workable consensus on replacement notations...)

"if it can't be notated it doesn't exist" isn't remotely a justifiable position, but it's often hard to argue AGAINST a position where you can't isolate and point to the thing yr trying to discuss in a shared language (you end up yelling DO YOU SEE?, or rather, DON'T YOU HEAR!)

(non-replicability is a good explanation for the weakness of pil's post-flowers output, but it's not an argument against the strength of the stuff they discovered on metal box, which i don't think better trained musicians had a prayer of discovering AT THAT TIME) (now, of course, "noise" is a huge terrain)

How do you explain my love for the generic album and _Happy?_, Mark? Lydon still hasn't learned how to sing.

"if it can't be notated it doesn't exist" isn't remotely a justifiable position, but it's often hard to argue AGAINST a position where you can't isolate and point to the thing yr trying to discuss in a shared language (you end up yelling DO YOU SEE?, or rather, DON'T YOU HEAR!)

Gigantic strawman: NONE of the pro-theory people have said "If it can't be notated, it doesn't exist." We've all said "Anything can be notated." Music theory is a meta-language that describes the algorithms people come up with to create music, no cast-iron rules for creating music.

(and yr love for _happy_ passeth human understanding, you big mentalist)

(my argument is really only that notation and theory and knowledge exist in history also, that they're not special upstairs rooms you can run to to escape the tides and currents of lived life, and then when you choose a theory to deepen yr understanding, you may [initially] be cutting yrself off from exactly the thing you want to understand, because theories — which is to say, generalisations — work by weighting the value of some aspects over others... if the thing you want to look at is operating right at the crux-point where the long-ago choice is an issue, then the theory you use to illuminate may murkify)

(the point is easier to illustrate via science) (plate tectonics for example)

I think that "initially" is doing a huge amount of work in that last post, Mark. If you learn theory and then come up with unimaginative stuff, I think the fault lies in your imagination, not in theory itself.

I like Ned's analogy of music theory as a foreign language, because oftentimes when learning a new language people are often terrified of bending the vocabulary to create idioms that more accurately express what they want to say. The more comfortable you get with a language, the more likely you are to start playing with its syntactic rules and the usual meanings of its words to get your point across AND be successful in having other speakers of that language understand you. (The big assumption here is that music is a medium of communication.)

I'm not sure that music theory can be that easily compared to scientific theory, if only because music theory aims almost exclusively at descriptive analysis in order to make repetion possible, and not at looking at origins to find objective truth (like plate tectonics).

Music theory is very much like the theory of language (and scribes of both often get caught up in lengthy syntax/grammar debates when in fact it's interpretation that is the crux) -- also remembering that communication is as often a product of what isn't said (what's the musical equivalent of blushing? I doubt it would be notated, but if it were, I wouldn't expect anyone to feel obligated to observe it).

in practice v.few ppl get beyond knowledge as the filling of a bucket and into knowledge as the lighting of a fire: this is totally true -- on some level I think I have a weird faith that the people who take knowledge as "bucket-filling" probably aren't going to be good at trying things with an empty bucket, either.

That's exactly how I feel, too.

So in light of this, I think it shows laziness and
lack of musicianship to only know three chords.
Talk about limiting yourself.

"He's playing Chuck Berry riffs! Badly! Wire sounds like
ELP compared to these guys."

Which makes Clash - Yes and the Replacements - Genesis.
I'm interested in music, not attitude. If I want attitude
I'll listen to my thirteen-year-old neighbor.

I'd say-
guitar: A-form & E-form barre chords, major & minor
Bass: none
drums: none
keyboards: all major & minor, though a lot of new wave type dudes get by with just right hand melody lines

:hides under bed and cries:

According to Bono: red guitar + three chords + the truth

haha. i'm no u2 fan, but is this right?!?

no the guitar has to be black

should be "red guitar + three chords = the truth," anyways.

Bono sang "All I got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth" in U2's cover of All Along The Watchtower. The line is based on a quote from Harlan Howard describing the perfect country song as "three chords and the truth."

U2 are not country though, so they might want to sometimes try some other chords. Like some minor ones for instance...

Not that they don't.....